10-5-18

October 5th, 2018

Sit down and I will try to tell you everything I know.  There will be gaps in the story and many facts may seem to contradict one another.  This does not make my story any less true.  It only lifts the thin veil of truth and reveals something we all know and fight to unknow.  Time is real, my friend, but it is not alone.

A long time ago, before you were born, a family moved onto this block.  Right across the street they lived.  Three months.  That is as long as they were here.  It was around the middle of October they arrived.  Small moving van.  No hired help.

For whatever reason to go knock, to welcome them to the neighborhood.  By Halloween the rest of us were here, at a party in this very house.  After dark the older kids escorted the young ones to go trick-or-treating.  The brick house across the street was lit and decorated so we asked the kids to do a little spying.  Tell us what the new family is like.

There were probably twenty kids and they all set off in different directions to maximize candy collection.  In there wake, we adults got into the liquor cabinet and put on better music.  We laughed, danced and talked too loud.  We talked too much.  I alone had grown up in this neighborhood and as its resident historian, I set out a round of tequila shots and lowered the music and dimmed the lights.

I began to spin the web of my story.  My story of the brick house across the street.  The day I snuck in when the previous owners were gone.  Gone for good.  They left everything behind.  They were weird, private.  But that is not the point.  Who they were is not the point.  They were who they were.  But it is what they left behind.  Well, that is something altogether different.

"I came in through the cellar.  There was a storm-door, unlocked.  The basement was lit by high, small windows.  It was cramped and as spooky as any basement at first.  Then I saw the cribs"

The circle of parents shifted uneasily and a couple of them snickered at my story.  I didn't mind.  I had their attention and we were all holding shots of tequila.  no one was allowed to drink until my story was over.  I noticed the mother from one family and dad from another sharing a glance.  I had seen them chatting at school functions or just in passing.  They shared a little too much, I thought, for it to be innocent.

"Secrets!" I shouted and thoroughly alarmed the group.  More than one spilling from their glass as they jerked back in alarm.

"Secrets collect in our lives like the cribs in the basement.  you might have one secret and no one will notice.  They might even see it and think, well, she's got one story at least.  But if you have twenty or more cribs in your basement, well, that's not a secret.  That's twenty plus secrets and that, my friends, is impossible to hide.  Stacked onto corners, strewn about the gloom like wooded prison cells.  I got out of there before I started looking closer, seeing what might be in those cribs."

I continued with my story.  How I had gone upstairs to a very normal hallway, a very normal kitchen, living room and bath.  Nothing to explain the twenty secrets screaming out from the basement.

"And then I opened the first bedroom door.

"There were five bedrooms.  Or should I say, there was one bedroom five times.  Each a version of the others.  Each with a single photograph on the wall.  Each telling a different version of the same story, a piece of the pile of secrets in the basement.

Inside the first room, a large bed and a wide crib filled all the space.  The photo, a happy couple holding twins.  Twins conjoined at the head.

Inside the second room, a large bed and two smaller cribs.  Again the room was filled.  This time the photo showed the couple, each holding a twin, bandages on their heads.

The third room had a bit more space.  Only one small crib and the large bed.  I did not want to see the photograph.  I wanted to retreat back to the previous room with its optimism.  Or to flee the house.  The image was of a child, finely dressed, brushed cheeks and dimes over the eyes.

The fourth room had only a small bed and a single crib.  The picture, of a child lying in soft bunting, arm outstretched as if reaching for something.

The last room had only the small single bed.  I knew before I looked.  Cribs piled high, shoved into corners.  The basement scene, that was the last photograph.  

The rooms told not one story but many, depending on the order visited.  i saw y own version and it was tragedy.  But there was a room with all the right pieces, the right photograph.  One could end there and walk away happy.  Forget the secrets in the basement.  I chose that room as mine to remember and so I did for many years.  Cheers!"

And we drank and the two who had shared the gaze no longer interacted, untangling their secret, pushing it alone into the basement.

Not long after, the children began to arrive from their adventures, their bags filled with candy and their eyes somewhat dark.  As if soaking up late evening like a kitchen sponge.

As for the neighbors' brick house?

Twins...

One child...

No children...

Only a mother and son...

Just an old man...

No one was home...

No two children told the same story.